Chapter 5
Willful Ignorance
Ragnar
Guess I really did scare her off. Ragnar stared into the blackness of the Veilwood over a crackling fire. Good.
Beside him, Moar whined for attention. Ragnar grunted, and the dog went silent.
“No, it’s not you,” he said and reached out a hand. “Never you, friend.”
It was Felgon’s visit from the rudiment department earlier in the day that had Ragnar so irritable. He didn’t care for visitors on the best of days and even less so when they were grating and useless. What was the point in coming out to the barn at all if he wasn’t going to mend the water runes?
They’re just animals, take them to the pond to drink, Felgon had said in his most arrogant voice, the result of having his head so far up his own ass he was practically choking on his horns.
The next time Ragnar saw Felgon, he would make the demon look like he sounded.
Moar whined again, and melancholy rapped at Ragnar’s chest. Strange, but it was only sympathy for the dog’s easily disappointed heart, surely.
He smoothed the fur between Moar’s ears, now up and alert with the third dose of that human-crafted tincture.
As frustrating as the last two had been to give, they were worth having his companion back to normal.
Perhaps the medicine would have gone down easier if Ragnar had offered more than a clipped “satisfactory” as praise…but Moar knew.
A second wet nose edged itself under his hand, and Ragnar huffed.
“Yes, yes, you too,” he mumbled and scratched under the second chin.
Moar wasn’t necessarily helpful when he accompanied Ragnar on his daily chores, but he didn’t get in the way, unlike another troublesome creature that had recently joined the menagerie.
The fire popped, and the atteapir runt chomped at the dancing embers.
She twisted up her silver muzzle from the smoky taste, all six eyes blinking, and then darted through the darkness like a streak of lightning to do it again.
She was entertaining at the very least, but her survival instincts had been given up in trade for a keen awareness of the creatures around her—too keen, really, because atteapirs weren’t meant to be sympathetic: they were meant to cut down predators and prey with their fire.
This one didn’t have fire though, devoid of the magic that made atteapirs what they were meant to be.
Ragnar remembered finding her, or rather being found.
When she cried out to him in the wood that day, she’d been skinny, soaking wet, and the exact right amount of pathetic to be bundled up in his tunic and toted home.
She recovered, but only grew to Moar’s size, and simply refused to be released back into the Veilwood, not that Ragnar tried very hard.
She wouldn’t survive without magic, and time proved she needed a job to satisfy her attentive demeanor.
She’d been doing well as protector for the horse Ragnar inherited from the human caravan, but once it learned the veilhounds were uninterested in eating it, the atteapir’s vigilance became much less useful.
The horse also couldn’t properly pet the atteapir to reassure her she’d done well, and by all the gods, did she require praise.
Unless she was attacking cinders, of course, then she had no use for anyone else, which was only a little disappointing.
Ragnar huffed again and dropped his gaze to the fire, red and orange flames fluttering—no, more like fidgeting, as they died.
The day had been especially long after a restless night.
Restless because of that other surprise visitor.
His sleep had been plagued with visions of the human—a creature he’d never thought of as anything but fodder for the Dreadmoor until he’d seen this one—and her threat to return.
But as Ragnar sat at the fire just out back of the barn, his apprehension that she would come around to bother him again proved to have all been for naught.
Moar nosed his knee with a grumble.
“I’m sorry, friend, but what did you expect?”
Not for the human to return, certainly. She may have been different looking, but in the end, she would be the same as all the rest.
It was better she stay away anyhow: the barn was just on the edge of the Veilwood, and something out there was wrong.
It wasn’t Ragnar’s job to sort out and mend—that was what the scouts were for—but it unsettled him nonetheless.
He’d been finding more orphaned creatures than ever before, and scouts were reporting worse injuries.
If a human, with their ridiculously short limbs and their uselessly bright eyes and their tantalizingly soft bodies—tantalizing to the appetite of the forest’s monsters, of course—encountered whatever horror was lurking in those woods, it wouldn’t survive.
And what a waste of their obtusely gentle voices that would be.
A veilhound called out from the safety and warmth of the barn behind him, her howl low and long.
The Bae’uth pack was growing restless, but they would be returned to duty with the guard in a few days and the Aun’eth would retire to the barn for rest and training.
Ragnar closed his eyes and listened as a wild veilhound answered from the forest. He recognized the spectral cry echoing through the trees, but he hadn’t heard it in at least a month.
It only answered when Kee’cer’uth howled but had not yet come close enough to evaluate for domestication.
The forest fell quiet, and melancholy made a curious return to Ragnar’s chest. Beastkeeper or no, Ragnar didn’t need another veilhound to look after, but that call had been so…hollow. Veilhounds did best in packs, and the least he could do was give this one a place to belong.
A snapping twig had Ragnar sitting straight, gaze scanning the darkness beyond the fire.
The atteapir fell still save for her twitching ears, and Moar lifted his head.
That wasn’t the sound of the lone veilhound; the call had been too far off.
Nothing else dangerous would dare come so close to the barn, and yet something was wandering through the woods.
And it was coming right toward him.
Ragnar stood and whistled short and sharp as his claws descended. Both atteapir and dog heeled, and a ghostly figure caught the firelight from between the trees. Ragnar blinked—that wasn’t right. Was he really so…so tired that his imagination was casting her amongst the wood?
But then Moar barked, and the red-haired human crashed through the branches with sudden speed as if following the sound.
“Oh, thank the gods!” she squealed when she finally stumbled out of the ferns, and then she was promptly knocked on her ass.
Ragnar probably should have known Moar would be back to his old self after just half the vial of medication, but then he never really liked another demon enough to tackle them.
The human, however, had roughly the same chance of surviving the Dreadmoor as she did of making enemies with the dog, and his delight at her return could only be expressed with a wet tongue.
She lay on her back, knees and hands up protectively, yet her laughter rang out into the small clearing as bright as the yellow lantern he kept at the foot of the stairs.
Ragnar huffed out a chuckle as Moar licked her face, but then the demon realized he was observing a little too much.
She couldn’t lie like that, not with her hind end toward the firelight and her legs kicking.
“Off,” Ragnar commanded as he stalked over, and Moar reluctantly stepped back, tail thrashing and tongue hanging out. “Manners.”
“Oh, it’s okay,” she said as her chirpy laughter died away.
“Would have been nice if he hadn’t stepped on my boob though.
” She grabbed said swell, much more than what her hand could hold, and gave it a squeeze.
In yet another low-cut tunic, her breast rounded up against the other one, and the valley between them deepened.
“What in blazes are you doing out here?” Ragnar spat against the unceremonious appearance of his fangs.
She blinked up at him from the ground as she adjusted her top, which did nothing to unfluster him. “I got lost making deliveries.”
“In the Veilwood?”
“I wasn’t in the Veilwood.”
Lie. It was apparent in both the quickness of her answer and the fact she had just stumbled out of said wood, but she was wearing that rune cuff, and while Ragnar couldn’t feel the magic in it, he knew Kizros’s work.
There was surely only so far she could go.
Maybe she had gotten lost in just a few yards of thicket before stumbling on the rune-marked trees.
Maybe human eyes were especially poor with all that white in them.
And maybe humans were just…simple. They certainly got themselves killed easily enough.
Ragnar clicked his tongue and offered her help up.
The green rings in her eyes set themselves on his hand and her smile grew mischievous.
She slipped her fingers over his with a delicacy he wasn’t expecting, and in lieu of pulling away, he jerked her to her feet.
Unfortunately, she was quite a bit lighter than he expected.
She let out a squawk and would have been chucked into the fire behind him if she didn’t have the good sense to flail out her other arm and grab hold of the sturdiest thing around—an already surly demon.
Ragnar held his breath as she squeezed, fingers digging into his shoulder where they only just reached, her other hand with a surprisingly firm hold on his own, and her body pressed to his.
Nope, that could not happen. He grabbed her waist, hands spanning around her middle, and shoved her away.
She stumbled, curls bouncing and probably her breasts too, but he refused to look.
“Sorry,” he mumbled as he let her go. “I’m used to handling much bigger beasts. ”
Her green eyes flicked up to him, bewildered but only for a moment. “I’ve never been called a beast before.”